The Book On Publishing

There was the author, Chad Harbach, who had spent a decade on a novel his friends thought he’d never finish. There was the agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who recognized its power. There was the editor, Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch, who won it in a high-stakes auction. With the story of one book, The Art of Fielding Keith Gessen examines the state of the troubled, confused, and ever unpredictable world of U.S. book publishing in the age of Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and e-readers.

I first met Chad Harbach during freshman year of college. We were both, I think, in a state of shock. I had come to school thinking I was a pretty sophisticated guy. In the first few weeks I found myself in the company of people who’d gone to the New England prep schools and the Manhattan private schools; these kids really were sophisticated. Chad, meanwhile, was from Racine, Wisconsin. He thought everyone was sophisticated. Our first conversation in the freshman dining hall was about how little we’d done with our lives thus far.

“T. S. Eliot was 22 years old when he wrote the first ‘Preludes,’ ” I said.

“Sure,” said Chad. “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise during what would have been his senior year.”

“And Keats!”

“Keats! He was 25 when he died.”

We became friends. Sophomore year we took an intense, five-person seminar on Herman Melville. Socially, Chad was shy, in almost any group of people the last to speak. In seminar he was no different, though when he spoke it always made a lot of sense. Both of us wanted to be writers; neither of us knew how to go about it. Chad joined the literary magazine; I submitted some stories to it. But we both knew that the college literary magazine did not a writer make. Chad wrote his senior thesis on William Faulkner; I wrote mine on T. S. Eliot. We played a lot of Ping-Pong.

After college Chad went back to Wisconsin and I moved to New York, then we both moved back to Boston. Three years after graduation, neither of us had produced much writing to speak of. I had started doing freelance journalism to pay the rent; Chad worked odd copyediting and administrative jobs. It wasn’t as hard to pay the bills as we’d feared, but it was hard to pay the bills and write. We’d both sworn that we’d never attend an M.F.A. program; in late 2000, we both applied to a number of them. I submitted a story about a group of guys sitting around talking about how they want to become writers and artists, knowing all the while that they never would; Chad submitted a long story about a college professor—a college president, actually—at a baseball game. The college president is a Melville scholar, and he has fallen in love with one of the players. The story was written in a more “postmodern” style than I had expected—Chad had recently read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and you could tell—but it was written extremely well. At a certain point, an errant throw sails into the dugout, striking the player the college president has fallen in love with. He rushes to the dugout to see what has happened. Chad said this was the first chapter of a novel. Both of us were rejected by five out of six programs, and accepted into one.

Four years later, we rented a large apartment in Brooklyn with an old friend of Chad’s from Wisconsin. His indie rock band, the Gloria Record, had just broken up, and he landed with us in New York. He found work waiting tables. Another friend of ours, a writer, had helped Chad find work as a copy editor for McKinsey, the management-consulting giant. I had gone back to freelance journalism. Intermittently I wrote my stories about young men who wanted to be writers; Chad intermittently worked on his novel about the college president and the baseball team. A year before we moved to Brooklyn we had started a literary magazine called n+1 with some friends. This now took up a lot of our time.

In early 2006, to get ourselves writing again, we set up a small workshop with two friends. We would meet once a month at Rebecca Curtis’s place in Park Slope and read one another’s stories. Becky was the most accomplished writer among us—she had already published in Harper’s and The New Yorker—and yet she never failed to make gluten-free cookies for our meetings. (“They were free of lots of things,” says Chad when I ask him to confirm this memory.) The workshop lasted only about six months, but it was my first chance to read Chad’s novel since back when we were applying to writing programs. It had changed a lot; the writing had become more direct, less fancy, and the focus of the story had shifted away from the college president and toward the source of the errant throw, a young shortstop named Henry Skrimshander, a prodigy and baseball genius, who until that throw had never made an error. In the aftermath of the bad throw (which puts his teammate in the hospital), he finds he can no longer get the ball to first. The team goes into a tailspin. The portion we read was about 250 pages. It was good, but it also struck me as a little light. So the shortstop couldn’t make a throw to first. So? I didn’t say this at the time, but it felt a little like a Disney film. (The Bad News Bears go to liberal-arts college.) I was surprised that my friend had spent five years working on something so insubstantial. On the other hand, he was doing a lot of other interesting stuff. Our magazine, n+1, was doing better than we’d ever expected, and Chad, in addition to editing pieces, organizing parties, and proofreading the whole thing, had become our conscience on the question of global warming. For about two years it was all he could read or talk about. Global warming and baseball. I had never seen Chad so angry about something.

So, anyway, we lived in Brooklyn. In 2005, our friend and co-editor, Benjamin Kunkel, published his first novel, Indecision, with Random House. In 2007, Becky Curtis published her book of stories, Twenty Grand, with Harper Perennial. In 2008, I finally published my book about young people who wanted to be writers, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Chad, meanwhile, was still writing his novel. Back home, his father, the head accountant at a trucking company in Kenosha, lost his job after the recession hit. Chad had earned $25,000 in 2007 and was getting less and less work from McKinsey, which had in any case moved much of his department to a tech center outside New Delhi.

Beginning to Worry

New York is a company town with several mostly non-overlapping companies. If you’re in publishing, you don’t meet that many people from finance, and if you’re in the art world, you don’t meet that many white-shoe lawyers unless they’re buying art. In fact, the worlds are even more segregated than that—writers don’t know that many artists, bankers don’t know that many lawyers. Each of the circles is large enough on its own and has neither need nor time for any of the others.

Our circle was publishing and academia. We knew a lot of magazine and book editors, grad students, literary agents, and writers. (These were all print writers. Internet writers and entrepreneurs had their own circle.) The agents were gloomy about the state of publishing, and the editors were gloomier. There were, as they explained it, several forces at work. The first was Barnes & Noble, which since the early 1990s had managed to open more than 700 “superstores” across the United States. The stores were gigantic. No one had ever sold so many books. Barnes & Noble became bigger than any individual publisher, a lot bigger, and started dictating its terms—greater discounts, more flexibility on returning merchandise. For small publishers, these policies could be ruinous. Meanwhile, over the years, as the book business had become more profitable, and more cutthroat, the publishers were swallowed one by one by large multi-national conglomerates. Periodically a German person would arrive in town and fire everyone. It made the editors uneasy.

Then came Amazon. Barnes & Noble had been the biggest, baddest bookseller in the history of the world. Amazon was bigger and badder. First it came for the used-book stores—it simply became too easy to find an old book for $.01, plus shipping, in about 30 seconds online, rather than hunting for it in the back of Joe’s Old Books. As Amazon kept expanding—it surpassed Barnes & Noble as the world’s largest overall seller of books toward the end of the last decade—independent stores began to close. The large chains began to look vulnerable. And in 2007, Amazon launched an e-reader. At first this seemed funny, nerdy, unrealistic—“What about reading in the bath?” people wondered—but Amazon wasn’t laughing. What exactly this would mean for the traditional publishers no one could say, but it made them more uneasy than they already were, and talking in a reassuring manner had never been Amazon’s strong suit. “It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of to fight them,” Amazon’s hyper-nerdy C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, told Charlie Rose when he came on to announce the Kindle. “And everything evolves.” Charlie Rose was impressed. “This is amazing,” he said, holding the Kindle. “It says ‘previous page.’ ‘Previous page’ is here, if you want to go back to the previous page.”

In short, our publishing friends were nervous. But we, on the writer side, were confused. Everyone was so gloomy and pessimistic, and yet periodically the publishers took us out to lavish lunches, and once in a while our friends would receive what seemed to us like huge advances. I got $160,000 for All the Sad Young Literary Men! My girlfriend, Emily Gould, also a writer, got $200,000 for a book of memoiristic essays. Our friend Jon-Jon Goulian, an idiosyncratic and gregarious young man who often wore a skirt to parties and also happened to be the grandson of the philosopher Sidney Hook, got $750,000 for his memoir of cross-dressing. These advances were always smaller than they sounded, representing as they often did years of work, and sometimes they were laughably small. Our friend Elif Batuman got just $7,000 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an extraordinary book of essays about Russian literature. My co-translator and I, plus the great Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, received $10,000, total, for a collection of her scary fairy tales.

Still, if publishing was in all the trouble we’d been led to believe it was in by our doom-and-gloom friends, where was all this money coming from? Were they suckers? Maybe they were suckers, but at least they still had jobs, at least for the most part. Chad no longer had a job, and I was beginning to worry. I knew he was going back and re-writing the early sections of his book. And I knew from my own experience that this was dangerous. One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore. With a long novel—and Chad said his novel was now up to 175,000 words, or about 600 pages—it might take six months or a year to go through and re-write the whole thing to your satisfaction. By then you’d have changed again and want to start re-writing the beginning. The book could begin to swallow itself. And Chad had run out of money. For years he had been ignoring his student loans, and in our Brooklyn apartment we could no longer answer our landline, because the collection agencies now called so often. Without having seen the book, I began to urge him to just send it out to agents and see what happened. The truth is I wasn’t confident anyone would want it; I thought Chad should move on to his next novel, or something else entirely.

The saving grace would seem to have been that we knew so many people. In mid-2009, Chad said he was 90 percent done with the novel. Word of this soon reached Elyse Cheney, the agent of one of our n+1 co-editors, who called him on the phone and asked to see what he had. Cheney is, unquestionably, one of the better agents in New York (though she had, a few years earlier, rejected my book), and Chad sent her his novel. Cheney took a while to respond. With each day that passed, the hope that she’d be excited by the book diminished. “As of today I declare it,” Chad wrote me in a g-chat 10 days in. “Elyse is in my head!” Finally Cheney wrote back, and Chad sent me a short e-mail with the subject heading “List of Writers Dissed by Elyse.” The e-mail read: “You. Me.”

Chad then sent the novel to my agency, also very highly regarded. They turned it down, politely, saying they admired the book but did not feel they were the right people to represent it. All right. To hell with the agents! We would sell the thing to the publishers directly. I happened to run into a senior editor from one of the major houses. I told him that Chad Harbach, whom he knew, had finally finished the novel he’d worked 10 years on. The editor suggested self-publication. “A lot of writers are doing that now,” he said. “It’s a good way to build a brand.” This was a brave and even legendary literary editor. But publishers weren’t feeling very well just then.

In late 2009, Chad asked me to read the novel. I printed it out at the n+1 office, in Brooklyn. Even single-spaced and double-sided, it took up 300 printed sheets. I read it over a weekend, and Emily, who had come to love quiet, self-effacing Chad, read it behind me, taking the pages when I was done with them, sometimes sighing impatiently because I was taking too long. The basic architecture of the novel was the same as when I’d read it three years earlier: A skinny young shortstop named Henry arrives at Westish College to play baseball. The team’s catcher, a hairy, burly football player named Mike Schwartz, takes him under his wing. Henry’s roommate is a brilliant black student named Owen, who is gay. The president of the college, after a lifetime of lighthearted heterosexual philandering, falls in love with Owen. Meanwhile, the president’s wayward daughter, after years of estrangement, moves back in with him. Henry, after an unprecedented streak of fielding—so impressive that he begins to be looked at by pro scouts—hits Owen in the face with an errant throw, putting Owen in the hospital, and afterward he can’t get the ball out of his glove to throw it to first. As before, the team goes into a tailspin. Henry goes into a depression. The president of the college fears telling his daughter about his affair.

Most of this had been in the book before, but in the past three years it had also been transformed. The relationships had taken on a depth that they hadn’t previously had; the story of the throw and its aftermath had acquired a kind of resonance that would have been hard to anticipate in the early versions. This was no longer a Disney movie. Henry’s confusion upon arriving at Westish, where everyone seemed to know so well what they are doing and where they are going, and he alone lost among them; Mike Schwartz’s disappointment at his own limitations, and the channeling of his energies into Henry’s career; the college president’s secret; and the emergence of his daughter, Pella, as one of the most interesting characters in the novel, the pivot on which the whole thing turns—it was like watching that guy who used to paint things on PBS, where he’d start with a few greenish brushstrokes and then before you knew it there was a tree. I mean, it was a little bit like that, but mostly it was just entirely engrossing and amazing. There was a whole world here, and it was very moving, and very generous, and humane. It was impossible to dislike and it was hard to put down. Two-thirds of the way through, Emily looked up and said, “What’s a shortstop?”

This seemed to be the sort of thing readers could really like. It also seemed to be the sort of thing publishers would really like. Were the agents blind? Had they even read the book? It was impossible to tell. Chad sent it to three more agents. They all said no. Then Chad sent the book to a 27-year-old agent named Chris Parris-Lamb.

The Apprentice

Chris Parris-Lamb is well over six feet tall, with sharp, aquiline features and neat black hair. He grew up in North Carolina and was an outstanding pitcher on his high-school baseball team, and he had hoped to play for the club team at U.N.C.—Chapel Hill. “I’m a pitcher and I throw 80; I think I can make the club team,” he says. “I show up, we’re in the tryouts, and there’s a left-handed kid from, like, downstate eastern North Carolina, a farm-raised kid. I don’t know what he was doing at U.N.C.—I mean, I do know; he’d chosen his education over going to a tiny school to play baseball. He was a lefty who threw in the low 80s. And I got cut; I did not make the club team.”

Parris-Lamb studied English and history and hoped to become a writer, but then, in his sophomore year, he read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. “I read that and realized, If there’re guys doing stuff like this, that’s not me. I can’t do that. But then I thought: Someone edited that book. Someone agented that book. I can do that. I can still be a part of this.” That summer, he had a very productive and enjoyable internship at the Burnes & Clegg literary agency, in New York, and when he graduated, in 2004, he moved to the city to start as an assistant and launch himself on the waters of publishing.

It turned out not to be a good moment. The co-owner of the agency, Bill Clegg, was in the throes of an addiction to crack cocaine. He was not coming into the office or keeping up with clients. As he would later reveal in his tell-all memoir, published by Little, Brown in 2010, he was instead holed up in various hotel rooms, strangers’ apartments, and even a random taxicab smoking crack, having sex, and drinking prodigious amounts of vodka. Clegg’s detailed memoir does not mention that while this was going on his partner, Sarah Burnes, was pregnant, nor that two assistants were holding down the fort, one of whom was a 23-year-old recent college graduate named Chris. Parris-Lamb did his best to cover for Clegg. He and Burnes had been advised that they could not tell clients what was happening with Clegg; they could say only that they didn’t know where he was or when he’d be back—“although I’d found a crack pipe in the office,” says Parris-Lamb. “I remember Nicole Krauss calling. This was right before the publication of The History of Love,” her breakout second novel. “Nicole said, ‘Chris, please tell me what’s happening with Bill.’ And I said, ‘Nicole, all I can tell you is that I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know when he’s coming back.’ ”

Parris-Lamb and Burnes were able to wind down the business, and then took what authors they could to another agency, the Gernert Company. Parris-Lamb thought of quitting and moving back to North Carolina, but first he had to help Burnes, who was now late in her pregnancy, with the transition. For several months after the move he was still dealing with the fallout from Clegg, but gradually he started selling books. The first one he took on was a debut novel called Mudbound, by a writer from the South named Hillary Jordan. Parris-Lamb loved the book but couldn’t get anyone in New York to take it; eventually he sold it to Algonquin Books, a small literary imprint in North Carolina. His next book was a fine political novel, The White King, by a young Hungarian writer named György Dragomán. Shortly after Parris-Lamb sold it, the publisher—venerable Houghton Mifflin, publisher of, among others, Philip Roth and a whole mess of textbooks—was bought by a curious Irish outfit called Riverdeep. “It’s conceivable that the people doing the deal didn’t even know that Houghton Mifflin published Philip Roth,” says Parris-Lamb. “They were like, ‘Look at what these guys make on calculus textbooks!’ ” A “re-structuring” followed. Three months before the publication of The White King, nearly everyone involved with it was laid off; the book tanked. The next book Parris-Lamb sold was by a young female sportswriter for The Village Voice. She had just started at the Voice, and the idea was that she’d produce an account of her year covering the New York Mets and the Yankees—what it was like to be a female in the locker room, what the players were like, and so on. Just weeks after the book was sold to Random House there was a reshuffling at the Voice. The editor in chief, David Blum, was let go, and shortly thereafter so was Parris-Lamb’s writer. She lost her press pass and with it her access to the locker rooms. The book had to be “reconceived” as an essay collection. It also tanked.

Parris-Lamb soldiered on and soon earned a reputation as an uncommonly discerning agent. Mudbound did well for Algonquin, and in the next five years, of the 35 books he took on, Parris-Lamb sold 34 of them—a remarkable record.

“Dear Chad . . . ”

The life of an agent is a mixture of reading, schmoozing, arguing with publishers for better treatment of authors, and, occasionally, playing publishers off one another in order to get the highest price for a book. The schmoozing part is important because the agent needs to know which editors at a publishing house he can approach with which kinds of projects—that is, which editors are interested in sports, which editors are interested in World War II, which editors are interested in memoirs about cooking. The agent in turn needs to introduce himself to editors, so they know the agent is not, for example, an idiot. But the reading part is more important. A good agent spends a lot of time reading the better literary magazines, looking for talent and developing projects with writers; he will also spend a certain amount of time reading his “slush” pile—all the unsolicited manuscripts and proposals coming in. Publishers tend to complain about agents pushing up advances, but they also rely on them to be the first line of defense against the absolutely unmanageable mass of submissions. Publishers used to employ readers to deal with the submissions; that function has been taken over by agents. But the agents, too, cannot keep up. Parris-Lamb says he gets about 70 queries and submissions per week. He reads all the cover letters, but it would be impossible to read all the submissions, many of which are whole books. “Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if not, then not.

Parris-Lamb says he was charmed though also slightly befuddled by the cover letter Chad sent with his submission. “It made the novel sound like a comedy of manners. It prepared me for a somewhat different reading experience than the one I ended up having.” In any case, he printed the manuscript out and took it with him on a weekend business trip to an M.F.A. program. This is something M.F.A. programs sometimes do—they spring for a few literary agents and editors to fly in from New York and give a talk about the publishing industry, then read some stories or chapters by M.F.A. students and give them pointers. It’s a working weekend, and it was the first time Parris-Lamb had gone on such a trip. “It was a very disheartening experience of reading really bad writing by M.F.A. students. I was feeling really down after, like, I want a good novel, but I’ll never find one.” On the plane ride home, Parris-Lamb took out Chad’s submission and started reading.

“My initial impression was like, Wow, I can’t believe how much baseball is in this. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, This is an n+1 guy?” Due to an essay by one of our co-editors in the first issue denouncing exercise, n+1 had developed a reputation as anti-sports. “I mean I never really met you guys before. I was like, I can’t believe somebody this good knows this much about baseball.” By the time Parris-Lamb got off the plane he was a good ways through the book and very worried. “When I began the book, I thought, This must’ve already been passed on by other agents. Like surely I’m not at the top of Chad’s list. But when I got halfway through I was like, Holy shit, there’s no way anybody’s passed on this.” Back in New York he wrote to Chad:

Dear Chad,

I don’t usually send emails like this before I’ve finished, but I don’t usually respond this strongly to the opening chunk of a novel, either—I’ve got another 250 pages to go in THE ART OF FIELDING, so I just wanted to let you know that I would be in touch soon (I may need the weekend—but I am hereby setting myself a deadline of Monday at the latest to finish and respond), and ask you to please not make any moves before I’ve had a chance to finish! And if you do need to hear from me before the weekend because other agents have responded more quickly, let me know and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. I guess I should say that I don’t mean this to be any sort of committal response, because it’s possible that my feelings could change in the next 250 pages (I wouldn’t expect you’d want a commitment from an agent who hadn’t finished your book anyway) . . . But then again I’d rather take that risk than not register my enthusiasm for what I’ve read so far and risk losing out to someone who moved with more alacrity. So, more soon—

Yrs,

CPL

Parris-Lamb then read to the end of the book; his feelings about it didn’t change. If anything, he was more devoted to it than before. He was also convinced that he was up against the best agents in New York: “I was thinking, How am I going to get Chad to pick me over these other people who must also have it? I wanted to call him, but I couldn’t, so I just wrote him—I just poured my heart out in this e-mail.” Here is what he said:

This is the hoariest cliché an agent or editor can offer, so you’ll have to forgive me for lacking novelty, but I loved this book in a way that reminded me of why I got into this business. Watching this novel unfold, I felt like Mike Schwartz at that field in Peoria when he first discovered Henry, and I saw something of myself in 22 year old Schwartzy at the end of the novel, too: those who can’t (or can no longer) do, coach; those who love books, but whose appreciation for what it takes to write great ones makes them all the more aware that they’ll never have what it takes—well, we go into publishing. And we hope that we’ll one day have the chance to actually work with books that make us feel like the ones we read back before reading was a job.

I can only imagine what kind of competition I’m up against to represent you, and I’m going to do everything I can to convince you that I should be your agent. It will hurt, to be sure, if it turns out that I won’t be, but I won’t love this novel any less because I don’t get to sell it, so I want to go ahead and thank you for the chance to have been one of the first people to read it, wherever things go from here—I can only imagine how long a novel this finely crafted must have gestated, and it’s a privilege to have read it so soon upon entering the world (to belabor that natal metaphor). That said, if you’ll give me the chance, I’m going to work like hell to see that it gets the publication, and reception, and readership it deserves. Books like THE ART OF FIELDING, and writers of your caliber, don’t come around very often; in the final reckoning, agents are ultimately only as good as the books they represent, and you’re giving someone a shot here to be the best.

Parris-Lamb then waited for Chad’s response. He would later describe the amount of time that went by as “days.” In fact, it was less than 24 hours. On the other hand, it was more than an hour, and for Parris-Lamb it was excruciating. He was certain that Chad had gone with some faster, older, more powerful agent. Finally, Chad wrote back to say that he was grateful for the e-mail and that he’d be happy to meet.

Parris-Lamb took Chad out to lunch at Craftbar, an elegant eatery just off Union Square. Lunch cost $92, about what Chad had in his bank account. Parris-Lamb still didn’t know whether Chad was considering other agents. “Chad’s quiet. I had no idea how I was doing. I was thinking, Have you had 10 of these lunches already? I could not get a read on him at all.” (A year and a half later, I was the one who told him that every other agent who’d seen it, including his former boss Bill Clegg, had turned the book down; I asked him what he thought of that. “I think that’s crazy,” Parris-Lamb said. “But I guess that’s how it should be—that’s how I know I’m the right person. I think someone would have to be crazy not to like this book.”) When the time came for Chad to ask some questions of Parris-Lamb, he asked just one. Whom would he send the book to? Parris-Lamb was ready for that. “Michael Pietsch and Jonathan Galassi,” he said.

Publishers as Investment Banks

When Chad and I were living in Prospect Heights, we kept very different schedules: Chad would go to sleep early and be up by seven; I would rise late and stay up until two or three. I used to spend the late portion of many evenings in the gigantic Tea Lounge on Union Street in Park Slope, along with a few dozen other people perched over their laptops and the occasional Orthodox Jewish couple on a date. Eventually I noticed a woman who was there pretty much every time I went in, and probably a lot of the times I didn’t, usually until midnight, with what were obviously manuscript pages, reading and reading. She did not look particularly happy to be doing this. I now realize she was an acquiring editor, reading submissions.

There are several levels of editor at a publishing house. There are assistant editors, who deal with minutiae such as line edits, editorial correspondence, and press quotes for the paperback edition of a book. And there are very senior editors, who have graduated to managerial roles—they are no longer very much on the lookout for new book projects, having their hands full running the publishing house. But the editors in between, which is most editors, are acquiring editors. Like agents, and for the same reason, they need to eat a certain number of lunches, introducing themselves and their tastes and interests to those agents so that they will receive their best submissions when the time comes. Some editors, like agents, read the better literary magazines; many young writers have received encouraging notes from Tim Duggan at HarperCollins, one of the savviest editors in the business, after publishing a short story in some obscure but well-regarded venue. Some leave this kind of scouting to the agents. All acquiring editors, however, spend an inordinate amount of time reading submissions. They get perhaps 10 agented submissions a week—meaning someone in the industry has staked his reputation on this being something the editor will like; receive enough bad submissions from an agent and you will stop reading submissions from that agent—and they must read them quickly. Like Parris-Lamb and the other agents he thought he might be up against, editors have no way of knowing who else has the book “on submission” or what the other editors might be willing to do. And if they want to bid for a book, they need to get a certain number of other people in the company to agree.

In a sense the publishers function a lot like investment banks—albeit very scrupulous investment banks in which five or six people have to read an entire novel before the bank puts down any money. Young editors have to get their boss’s go-ahead for even the tiniest, $5,000 advance, and whereas at some houses the very senior people don’t technically need to go to their corporate superiors unless they’ve gone over some established “level,” for the most part they still do. As one former editor in chief put it to me, “Even if you don’t need to get permission from the publisher to spend $400,000, if all it takes is a walk down the hall, why not do it?” Of course before you go to the very top, you may want to run it by your assistant, to make sure you haven’t lost your mind; you may want to run it by someone in sales, since they’re going to have to sell this thing to booksellers. At some houses the editor of the paperback division needs to read the submission; and why not show it to your spouse, whose judgment in other matters has been sound? And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well. This makes sense, since eventually, if the book gets bought, the publishing house has to convince a whole lot of other people to read it, too. If you can get your house to back you, then you put in a bid. Other publishers put in competing bids. An auction ensues. In recent years, as publishers have grown larger and acquired or created more sub-units (or “imprints”), you may even find yourself bidding against someone from the same company, although for the most part this practice has ended and been replaced with what is known as a “bidding war plus beauty contest”—the publishing house presents a unified bid during the auction (bidding war) and, if that bid wins, the various imprints meet with the author to try to impress him (beauty contest).

As for how much money you ought really to plunk down on a book, there are some guides you can use. Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales of individual books at about three-quarters of the bookselling cash registers across the country, can tell you how much an author’s last book sold—this is her “sales track,” and it gives you some idea of how well her next book might sell. But it can be the wrong idea: Emma Donoghue had published six novels before her 2010 Room, the two most recent of which “BookScan” at 1,852 and 1,119 copies, respectively, in hardcover in the U.S. Room has sold more than half a million in hardcover and digital and is still going. If it’s the writer’s first book, and she has no sales track, you can come up with similar-seeming books (“comp titles”) and see how many copies they sold. But this is precision masquerading as insight. No two books are the same book, and no two authors are the same author. The fact is: no one has any idea how many copies of a book will sell.

There is a certain amount of politics involved within a house—if you are a jerk and people don’t like you, they probably won’t like the books you ask them to read, and they won’t do their best design work for you, and they won’t go out and sell the book with all the fervor they can muster—but in the end an editor is judged by the books she edits. And these, in the end, are judged by their sales. Critical acclaim is great, and in the long term, in fact, it sells books better than anything else, but sometimes it’s worthwhile to publish a cookbook, or a mystery novel by a Swede. Even an editor like Gerald Howard, of Doubleday, who is known for his literary discernment (he was the first editor of David Foster Wallace), publishes the best-selling Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club; even Drenka Willen, of Harcourt, who seems to work exclusively with Nobel Prize winners, has a Norwegian mystery writer in her stable.

In short, books and their sales are the currency of the realm, and they are the path upward. If you’re a junior editor, you need to make one good call—probably on a small, paperback-only book, since you’re not really in a position to bid on a hardcover that could become a best-seller—to get promoted to a full editorship. This may mean a book that does much better than expected, or a book that receives very good reviews, or a book that wins a prize. Once promoted, you need to prove you can produce for the house. This could mean finding the one author who is going to stick with you and consistently make money. “You see these people at Knopf,” one agent told me, “and they never buy any books—they never do anything. You think, Why are they still drawing a salary? And then you find out they bought Anne Rice or someone in, like, 1982.” Those editors have tenure. Or it could mean consistently picking winners, which is hard. Most books lose money. Daniel Menaker, formerly of Random House, and before that, The New Yorker, compared it to gambling. “You put your money down and most of the time you lose. But when you win, you can win big. It’s like going to Mohegan Sun.” Some people really have a knack for it and get promoted up and up. Anyone with the money can buy a memoir by Bill Clinton in 2001; the trick is buying the memoir by Barack Obama in 1990. Menaker used the example of Reading Lolita in Tehran. “Reading what where?” he says. “What the fuck is this? This isn’t Lose 20 Pounds in 20 Days. It’s by an obscure foreigner, about a foreign country. Who’s going to read this?” But the book, bought by Random House for $30,000 for world rights in 1999, was chosen by Borders as an Original Voices selection, sold very well in hardcover, and then sold ridiculously well (over a million copies) in paperback, for a profit in excess of $10 million, give or take. This was a sharp-eyed move by a young editor. Other people find that they do not have the knack and leave the business (or get fired). Some others may leave because they are underappreciated. A friend of mine who is a young editor told me indignantly that the editor of last year’s Sht My Dad Says left HarperCollins recently to work for Scribd.com in part because she hadn’t received a promotion for Sht.

“You say that like she edited Ulysses,” I said.

“I don’t care!” said my friend. “It was a No. 1 best-seller!”

“A Tyro Editor”

Michael Pietsch grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of an army officer. He had six brothers and sisters. In the early 1970s, as part of the forced integration mandated by Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, he was bused to mostly black Booker T. Washington High School. Five feet ten and skinny, Pietsch nonetheless managed to become a captain of the football team. In 1974, he went to Harvard, the only one of his siblings to go out of state for college. He didn’t feel as if he exactly fit in there. “Everyone had on these khaki pants and shirts with alligators on them,” he said. “I felt like they’d all been handed a manual that I’d missed somehow.” Pietsch played a lot of Ping-Pong in the basement of Adams House. He graduated with a degree in English; his senior thesis was called “Chaucer and Boethius: The Christian Implications of Two Methods of Portraiture in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.” Pietsch briefly considered going to law school, but he had such a good time interning his senior year at David R. Godine, a Boston publisher, that upon graduating he took a job there before eventually moving to New York to become an assistant at the Scribner publishing house, which at the time was still owned and run by Charles Scribner Jr. Pietsch worked on self-help books, how-to-build-things books, military histories. “I did what editors do.” Eventually he began acquiring novels. His first acquisition was a mystery novel; his second was Meditations in Green, a novel about the Vietnam War by a veteran named Stephen Wright. Pietsch read it slowly as it came in and eventually concluded it was the best account of the war he had seen. But it wasn’t an easy sell. “Scribner was a very fusty company that was really living on their backlist,” Pietsch says. “They had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Wharton!—everything else was seen as a ‘risk.’ ” He’d been working on the manuscript awhile, unable to get his boss interested. “One day Mr. Scribner was walking through the floor saying, ‘Anybody have anything they need me to read?’ And I put it in his hands. He recognized it right away.”

“When someone allows you to spend their money,” says Pietsch, “to pass their money along to a writer whose work you think is good so that writer can earn a living? That is an extraordinary trust. To have someone let you do that—it’s an amazing thing.”

Pietsch worked at Scribner for six years. His most visible project came when Mr. Scribner needed someone to edit a Hemingway manuscript that had been sitting in his drawer for many years. It was an account of a trip to Spain that Hemingway had taken late in his life to watch the bullfights for a summer. He was on assignment for Life but ended up producing a book-length manuscript. The Life excerpts had been badly received, however, and shortly thereafter Hemingway killed himself. Charles Scribner Jr. had periodically tried turning the manuscript into a book, but never to his satisfaction.

“Mr. Scribner appeared in my office one day with this big old manuscript and the three old magazines and said read these,” indicating the magazines, “and read this,” indicating the manuscript, “and tell me if you think there’s a better book in here than in these.” Pietsch read through the manuscript and began to understand the problem with the Life articles. “What had happened was that three excerpts from different pieces of this memoir had been taken, entire, untouched within themselves, with no editing, no continuity. They just didn’t make any sense. I could see why they were badly received.

“And then I read this book. It was a beautiful book, with a strong central story. It was really lovely. The writing was glorious. The editing was very easy. There were passages that just fell out really cleanly, and then this strong central line.”

Pietsch speaks quietly and thoughtfully. He is the head of a very large business division and possibly the most humble person I’ve ever met. This is just an example of it; when he described the editing process on the Hemingway book, it sounded as if he’d cut a few paragraphs here and there. In fact, as I learned later, he had cut the manuscript down by more than half. The Dangerous Summer became a best-seller; book-review editors sent correspondents to the John F. Kennedy library, in Boston, which housed the original manuscript, to compare the final version to it; Pietsch was not yet 30 years old. He was “a tyro editor,” Charles Scribner Jr. recalled in his memoirs, “who did a splendid job.” In 1984, Mr. Scribner sold the family firm to Macmillan for $15 million; Pietsch left for Harmony Books, a division of Crown, where he acquired literary fiction, including the work of Martin Amis, and popular music titles, including Chuck Berry’s autobiography. In 1991, he went to Little, Brown, which was having trouble transforming itself from a venerable old Boston publisher into a modern New York publisher that could make big books rather than continue to live off The Catcher in the Rye, which it had published 40 years earlier.

The Top of the List

Late last year I found myself sitting on a transatlantic flight next to an older gentleman who was clearly reading submissions. A literary agent, I decided, and I was right. His name was Laurence Kirshbaum. Before becoming an agent he had been the C.E.O. and chairman of the Time Warner Book Group, which had acquired Little, Brown in 1968. “The smartest thing I ever did was put Michael Pietsch in charge there,” Kirshbaum told me. He had left in 2005 to found his own literary agency, just before Time Warner sold its entire books division to the French publisher Hachette.

Kirshbaum started in publishing in the early 70s. He’d graduated from the University of Michigan in 1966, worked for a few years as a reporter for Newsweek, co-wrote a book—Is the Library Burning?—about student protests, and then went to work for Random House as a salesman in 1970. He went door-to-door in New Jersey persuading drugstores, small groceries, and gift shops to take some books. This was called opening “accounts.” In 1974, he moved to Warner Books and rose through the marketing end of the business to eventually become publisher, in 1985. He worked with businesspeople like Jack Welch and Michael Eisner on their memoirs. He’d had a great time. “There’s no feeling in the world like getting to the top of the list,” he said, meaning the best-seller list. “Maybe Michigan winning the Rose Bowl,” he added, recalling his allegiance to the Wolverines. “And having a grandchild.”

I personally was so used to sad stories about publishers losing money all the time that I asked, incredulously, “So they make money?”

Kirshbaum laughed. “You bet they do!”

It’s hard for writers to believe, but publishing is a big business. It’s not the oil business or the auto business or even the cell-phone business, but total book sales in the United States last year were $13.9 billion—and twice that if you include textbooks and other educational materials. Random House, the biggest of the so-called Big Six publishers, brings in about $2.5 billion a year in revenue; Hachette Book Group, at the smaller end of the Big Six, brings in about $700 million. Michael Pietsch’s Little, Brown, which sold 21 million books in 2010, accounted for more than a quarter of that. The vast majority of publishers’ revenue (100 percent, in the case of Little, Brown) is from the sale of books and subsidiary rights to books; for the moment, publishers really have no other way to make money. They sell books. And they do make money. That’s the point of publishing. When you are an editor, either your books sell copies and make money or they do not. And the fact of the matter is that, if they are not making money now, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that they will make money in the future. “People remember the exceptions,” says Pietsch. “They remember Faulkner,” who was, famously, out of print when Malcolm Cowley brought out The Portable Faulkner, with Viking, in 1946. “They remember Moby Dick. But if you look at the books that are backlist classics now, they were almost invariably best-sellers when they were new. The Catcher in the Rye. The Sun Also Rises. The Great Gatsby. These books were not discovered by the academy over centuries. They were sensations! Even Virginia Woolf was a best-seller in the U.S. during her lifetime. So a publisher is very strongly motivated to make their new books as successful as they can.”

Publishing houses appear to be giant monoliths. In fact, in the end, they are the sum total of the judgment and taste of their individual editors—current editors, who buy the new books, and past editors, who created the backlist. Of course there are constraints. When Pietsch was at Scribner, the house was on the wane; at his next job he worked for an imprint that did not have a reputation for publishing fiction. In many ways this determined what he was able to publish. “When as an editor you’re not known, at places that aren’t known, for publishing fiction, what you get submitted to you is stuff that everyone else has passed on,” Pietsch says. “I ended up publishing a lot of dark, very difficult books, because that was the best stuff that was submitted to me. And I love those books. But I love straightforward, traditional books, too.”

At Little, Brown, Pietsch was able to publish writers like Anita Shreve (The Pilot’s Wife, Oprah’s Book Club selection, March 1999) and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones, 7.5 million copies sold); the humorist David Sedaris and the mega-best-selling thriller writer James Patterson; and more difficult writers, too. In 1992, Pietsch acquired and in 1996 published David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thirteen years later, after Wallace committed suicide, Pietsch went to Wallace’s home in California and began the work of piecing together the fragments of his last novel, The Pale King.

The Auction

As promised, Parris-Lamb sent out The Art of Fielding to Jonathan Galassi and Michael Pietsch simultaneously, on a Friday in early February 2010. Galassi was a key player in the drama that followed: a respected editor, poet, and translator, he had been the publisher of F.S.G. since 1999, during which time he’d published Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, and many, many others. He had also, in late middle age, come out as gay. The main question with Galassi was whether, as one of the industry’s premier editors, he would find this first novel to have literary worth. Another question was whether he would find the midlife coming-out story of President Affenlight credible.

Galassi contacted Parris-Lamb on Saturday afternoon. He had read the entire manuscript in just over a day and found it extraordinary. He wanted to meet with Chad. On Tuesday morning they met, and that afternoon Galassi made what is known as a “pre-empt”—he offered $175,000 for world rights to the book. A pre-empt is, essentially, an offer that is meant to be so good that the writer cannot refuse it. It is usually final. In this case the amount of money was not overwhelming (even if it equaled Chad’s total earnings over the past seven years), but it was pretty good, and it was from F.S.G.

Chad and Chris thought about it for a day—they thought about it hard—and consulted with others. I thought they should take the offer. Another friend of ours, an editor at a large commercial house, thought otherwise, though Chad could not disclose the pre-empt amount to her. “You’ve been working on this book for 10 years,” she said. “Unless it’s Jon-Jon money, I say take it out to others and see what you can get.” Jon-Jon, of course, was Jon-Jon Goulian, who had gotten $750,000 from Random House. After a sleepless night, Chad decided to take his chances. He and Chris declined the pre-empt.

What followed was a dizzying week of meetings with the major publishers. Parris-Lamb had been true to his word by sending the manuscript to Galassi and Pietsch, but he had also sent it to 14 other editors. News of Galassi’s pre-empt sped through New York, adding a sense of urgency to the reading process. In the span of four days, Chad, shy and broke, met with Sonny Mehta, the editor-in-chief of Knopf; HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham; Norton editor in chief Starling Lawrence (who has since stepped down); Paul Whitlatch, an editor at Scribner; and Paul Slovak and Josh Kendall of Viking. Chad found Mehta surprisingly quiet, whereas Kendall, he said, was voluble in his admiration of the book. “That guy can really talk,” said Chad. Our friend Allison Lorentzen, an associate editor at HarperCollins, who wanted to bid on the book, was so nervous before taking Chad into the meeting with Burnham that she upbraided him about his appearance. “You’re not wearing a belt!” she said.

After the meetings were finished, Parris-Lamb called for an auction. A publishing auction is like an old-fashioned art auction except the bidders are not all in the same room and get a lot more time. Parris-Lamb started the bidding at $100,000 for North American rights, and by noon the next day he had eight bids ranging from $110,000 (Norton) to $150,000 (Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch, who had finished reading the book only that morning). Parris-Lamb called Norton and informed them of the high bid. Norton beat it by $10,000, and Parris-Lamb approached the new low bidder (Knopf), who went up to $200,000. And so it went. By the end of the day, Scribner was the top bidder at $330,000, and the next morning Lorentzen and HarperCollins came in at $350,000, despite Chad’s lack of a belt. Viking dropped out. Holt bid $400,000. Little, Brown was next, and ready for the auction to end. They bid $600,000. Chad and Chris assumed that was it. Smaller, independent Norton dropped out; deep-pocketed Knopf followed suit. But Pietsch’s old publisher Scribner bid $610,000. Now Lorentzen and HarperCollins dropped out, and, with just two publishers left, Parris-Lamb called for blind “best bids.” Little, Brown came in at $665,000; Scribner came in at $750,000. Another difficult decision had to be made. The money difference was far from trivial; on the other hand, Michael Pietsch said that he himself would edit the book. This clinched it. Chad and Chris would leave $85,000 on the table for the opportunity to work with the editor of David Foster Wallace. That editor had also, of course, put up $665,000.

It was the biggest fiction auction in recent memory; it was especially eloquent after the darkness of 2009, when publishers had had to lay off staff, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt temporarily stopped acquiring new titles. UNEMPLOYED HARVARD MAN AUCTIONS BASEBALL NOVEL FOR $650,000, read the headline a short time later at Bloomberg.com, understating the final figure slightly. In the next months the rights to the book were sold in Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, and Germany for, all told, about half as much again as the American advance. Allison Lorentzen, who had bid on the novel for HarperCollins, was commended on a job well done (not long ago, she became an editor at Penguin); one young agent who passed on the novel was reprimanded by his colleagues (he has since moved on to another agency). Lorentzen says she was disappointed not to have won the book, but also a little relieved.

“What would I have done if I’d actually won the auction?,” Lorentzen said to a colleague.

He answered, “You wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”

This was now Michael Pietsch’s problem. But one suspected that he would not be losing any sleep.

Cover Story

The e-book revolution sneaked up on a lot of people (me, for instance). There had been plenty of talk about it and wild predictions, but it all seemed a long way off. Still, Amazon kept banging its drums. In mid-2010, the company announced that for the first time ever it was selling more e-books than hardcovers. The announcement made a big splash in the papers but it seemed premature—Amazon was the only one selling e-books in such quantities; e-books were much cheaper than hardcovers; etc. But then publishers began seeing the numbers show up on their sales sheets. I published a small book in June 2010 and was shocked to find that digital downloads accounted for almost 20 percent of total sales. For a best-seller, the numbers were higher—Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, published in August 2010, has had about 30 percent of its near-million total sales in the digital format. By the spring of 2011, the numbers for a best-seller were as high as 50 percent e-book; Hachette reported that e-books were accounting for 20 percent of total revenue. That spring, I was told about a meeting that Amazon had had with high-level editors where it announced that it was now planning for an all-digital world. (An Amazon executive denies that anything “so literal” was said.) At this time Amazon also announced that it was starting its own romance imprint, then its own mystery imprint. Amazon was becoming a publisher. In February, Borders, the country’s third-largest bookseller after Amazon and Barnes & Noble, had filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors. Hachette was near the head of that list, with a claim on the chain of $37 million.

In those same months, the great machine that is Little, Brown, a division of Hachette Book Group, which is owned by Hachette Livre, which is a subsidiary of the large French conglomerate Lagar­dère, slowly ground into gear for Chad’s book. Michael Pietsch read the manuscript from the top again and sent Chad some notes for revision. Keith Hayes, a muscular, tattooed cover designer from Staten Island, labored over a design that would communicate the depth and warmth of Chad’s novel without—this was a direct order—making reference to baseball. Little, Brown jacket meetings take place on Thursday mornings, and on four consecutive Thursday mornings Hayes presented several versions of possible covers to the Little, Brown brain trust. Four times in a row he was rejected, until on the fifth Thursday Hayes finally came with a cover they liked—it had a photo of a young American guy in a golden American wheat field, above him stretching a big American sky. They sent it to Chad, who didn’t like it at all. In this realm, at least, the author is king. “You don’t want a cover that makes the author cringe,” says Pietsch. Hayes, secretly relieved, went back to work, finally producing a striking all-text design with a blue background and “The Art of Fielding” in a bold, white cursive. Parris-Lamb went down to the Barnes & Noble on 54th Street and Third Avenue and paper-clipped a color printout of the new design onto one of the books that was on the New Fiction table. Then he stepped away to see how it compared with the other books. It compared just fine.

The cover in hand, Little, Brown could print its catalogue—the 70-odd titles it would publish in fall-winter 2011. Chad’s book was the first one in the catalogue, which was significant; it was with this catalogue that the Hachette sales force, 50 men and women strong, began to cover the land in the early spring of 2011. They loaded up their Oldsmobiles and Hondas with catalogues and audio snippets and hit the road. Times had changed since Larry Kirshbaum went door-to-door selling books in New Jersey. As the independent bookstores had thinned out, some of the Hachette salesmen had to cover a lot more interstate. With many of the remaining bookstores consolidated into gigantic chains, other Hachette salesmen concentrated their efforts on Barnes & Noble’s headquarters, on Fifth Avenue. There is exactly one “literary fiction” buyer for all 700-plus stores. She could make or break a book, for, as long-time industry analyst Mike Shatzkin puts it, “a book that is in the store in which a customer shops has a nearly infinitely larger chance of being purchased than a book not in the store.” And so the salesmen do their best to get their books into the stores, and they especially did their best for Chad’s book. Although every book in the catalogue is sacred to them, there is only one first book in the catalogue, and it is The Art of Fielding.

Publication was scheduled for September. In early May, Little, Brown printed 5,000 galleys of the book. When Parris-Lamb heard this number, he coughed. “That’s a good number of galleys,” he said. Michael Pietsch agreed. “It’s more than the print run of some books.” In May, June, and July, Marlena Bittner, Chad’s publicist at Little, Brown, sent out 200 of the galleys to magazine and newspaper editors, radio producers, and freelancers. Bittner then hunkered down and answered a lot of e-mails: interview requests, fact-checking questions, requests for further galleys. Another publicist sent galleys to online reviewers. But the biggest target for the galleys were booksellers: Little, Brown gave away approximately 1,500 galleys at BookExpo America, the annual spring gathering of the tribes in New York.

The relative importance of different kinds of influence has shifted over the years. It used to be that booksellers and the editors of The New York Times Book Review were the most important people in the business; then came Oprah, and Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Then a million Amazon reviewers, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. All of the old things are still important; it’s just that the new things are now also important. Little, Brown has a dedicated Twitter feed with more than 150,000 followers; it has a publicist on staff whose job it is to contact people whose blogs are mostly about their cats. But I was surprised to hear from Heather Fain, the head of marketing at Little, Brown, about just how much energy still goes into wooing the independent booksellers. They are visited by salesmen and sent galleys; at BookExpo there is a dinner for them. All this because they, more than anyone else, can put a book into someone’s hands and urge them to read it. Would Fain, if she could, trade the affection of these booksellers for any single item of publicity? A positive review in the Times would not be enough, but how about the cover of the Times Book Review? It would depend on the review, said Fain. “If it is a rave review, if Jonathan Franzen wrote and said, ‘This is the new me,’ or Don DeLillo wrote it and said, ‘I will never write a book again because this man has written anything I could ever do’ ”—well, in that case, maybe, but only because the booksellers would really enjoy a review like that.

Whooping. Applause.

In late May, three months from publication, Michael Pietsch squared off against five other editors at the Javits Center, in Manhattan. The forum was BookExpo America’s Editors Buzz panel. Pietsch had applied to be on it, so as to take his case for The Art of Fielding directly to the people, but he was certain he’d be denied—he had been on the panel last year, to speak about Emma Donoghue’s Room, and this was, for an editor or publisher, by far the most coveted speaking slot at the entire four-day affair. On the other hand, put yourself in the shoes of the panel’s organizers. This was Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, editor of David Foster Wallace, whose last novel had just been published in Pietsch’s edit, posthumously, during the spring, and had reached the best-seller list, an honor never bestowed on Wallace while he lived. You’d be crazy not to let Pietsch on the panel. And, anyway, it wasn’t as if he’d lied last year about Room.

Pietsch was the only man on this year’s panel. After an introduction by the head buyer for the beloved City Lights bookstore, in San Francisco, the editors went one by one down the row in reverse alphabetical order. All the books this year were novels. The first editor read directly from a prepared speech. Her book was about a widow who has to deal with the aftermath of her husband’s death—and all the secrets he has left behind. At a certain point in the presentation the editor—who is quite young—explained that she too was a widow. The next editor presented a novel about a young man who wants nothing more than to be an Olympic runner—in Rwanda. Unfortunately, the Hutu génocidaires have other ideas. “Eight hundred thousand people were killed,” the editor reminded her audience.

Michael Pietsch was next. His book was neither about a widow nor a genocide, but short of getting up and running out of the auditorium, there was nothing he could do about it now. Pietsch went to work, only occasionally glancing at his notes, and immediately dug himself a big hole. He described the plot of the novel, how Schwartzy recruits Henry on a baseball field in Peoria, brings him to Westish College, and tasks him with leading the team to victory; he described Henry’s error-free streak, and then his errant throw. It sounded like a baseball novel. Many of the booksellers in the room were women. And Pietsch is an attractive man, especially on this day, his suit neatly pressed, his chestnut-brown hair parted handsomely, and his slightly high-pitched voice occasionally cracking under the strain. But there is only so much about baseball that a woman is willing to hear from a man, no matter how sensitive he is. Michael Pietsch was in trouble. “That sounds like a baseball novel,” he admitted. But there was more to it than that. Rallying, Pietsch described the existential questions at the heart of the book, its atmosphere of longing and confusion. “This is a novel about perfection, about striving, about youth,” he said, “about those years when your job is to learn everything you can learn and try to understand anything you can understand, to try to study literature, and philosophy, and figure out who you are, and who you might become.” He finished by reading from some of the early praise for the book, including Jonathan Franzen’s. The room erupted in applause; there was even whooping. (“It was two girls behind me,” Heather Fain told me. “I was worried people would think it was me, but it wasn’t. They didn’t even work for Little, Brown.”) Pietsch had made it through.

The next two presentations could not compete. “Damn,” said Alane Mason, of Norton, when it was her turn. “I knew Michael Pietsch was going to be a hard act to follow.” Mason is a very good editor, but I can’t remember what the novel she presented was about. The next editor read a prepared speech, as the first editor had, and when she was done, some people got up to leave. The final editor was Alison Callahan, from Doubleday. She started slowly, haltingly, with a quip that didn’t go over that well. Then she described what it was like to read the novel she was presenting—The Night Circus—on submission, and things picked up a bit. Callahan had read the first 30 pages, she said, and then taken the rest of the book down to the Random House cafeteria. Five hours later, she was finished. One imagined the janitors mopping the floor around her; dimming the lights; waiting for her to finish. Then Callahan described the book itself: It was a tale of two magicians, a boy and a girl, who are involved in a battle at a mysterious traveling circus. Except they have fallen in love. Except the battle is to the death! The booksellers held their collective breath. Callahan also had blurbs, just as Pietsch did. So many, in fact, that she couldn’t even choose any to quote from. Finally, she said, it was worth noting that the book had already been bought by a major Hollywood studio—in fact the same one that had made the Twilight movies—and production on the film was full speed ahead. That was the end of the Buzz panel. The booksellers and journalists and rival editors streamed out of the auditorium, to the tables where galleys were being given out. The Art of Fielding galleys went quickly, the BEA staff working hard to open the boxes to meet the demand. But at the table for The Night Circus, there was total pandemonium.

On my way out of BEA, I ran into James Atlas, the former New Yorker staff writer, the author of well-regarded biographies of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, founder of the popular Penguin Lives series, and most recently the president of a small but plucky publishing house, Atlas & Co. “Don’t put me in your article!” said Atlas, joking. We chatted. Then I saw a very familiar-looking man leaving the Javits Center and getting into a bright-red sports car. I thought I recognized the man, but how could it be? Then I remembered. A few weeks earlier I’d walked into one of the remaining Manhattan Borders stores, the one next to Madison Square Garden, to see what sort of mayhem was afoot, and was greeted by the following books enjoying prominent display on the front table: Bossypants, a memoir by the actress and comedian Tina Fey (Little, Brown); Stories I Only Tell My Friends, a memoir by the actor Rob Lowe (Holt); and Ice, a memoir by the actor and rapper Ice-T (One World/ Ballantine, a division of Random House). At the time I thought, If this is what Borders is doing, then good riddance to them. But a few weeks later, outside BEA, I said, “That’s Ice-T.”

“Who?” said James Atlas.

“Ice-T,” I said.

“The rapper?” said James Atlas.

“Yes. He just got into that red car. And,” I said, leaning over to make doubly sure, “that car is a Bentley. We just saw Ice-T get into a red Bentley sports car. He wrote a book, you know. A memoir.”

And at this the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet took out his BlackBerry and texted his son that he had it on good authority that outside BEA he had just seen the rapper and author Ice-T.

The Royal Treatment

How much is all this going to change if in 10 years the printed book is a curiosity, something that you remember only a week before Christmas, at which point you log on to Amazon and ask them to print something up for you and deliver it to your loved ones by the morning of December 25? It is axiomatic in the publishing world that half the publishers now standing will no longer exist five years from now—at the top of the pyramid, the Big Six will become the Big Three. (Or as one editor put it during BEA, “They’ll still exist. They’ll just be part of one another.”) Amazon produced a sensation in the publishing world when, the day before BEA, it announced it was hiring Larry Kirshbaum, the man for whom a No. 1 best-seller was as good as a Rose Bowl victory for Michigan or the birth of a grandchild, to head up its new general-trade-publishing arm, to be headquartered in New York. Some immediately cried foul; Larry’s name and picture appeared over blog posts decrying the traitorous old publisher.

“The only necessary parts of the business are authors and readers,” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle content, told me in New York. “Everybody else has to figure out how to be useful and relevant in connecting those two groups.” Grandinetti spoke of the inefficiencies he saw in publishing—in marketing, in distribution—that will be mitigated or even eliminated in a digital world. But Amazon has been hiring editors. David Blum, whose firing from The Village Voice upended the plans of one of Parris-Lamb’s first clients, is now the editor of Kindle Singles, Amazon’s program for long, stand-alone articles and narratives. And now they’ve hired Larry. This suggests that at least one element of the old model—the editor—will still stand. The publishing consultant Shatzkin claims that the old publishing model is extinct, that the giant effort of getting a book onto thousands of shelves around the country, for which publishers for a hundred years have been deploying an army of salesmen, printers, and distributors, is now as easy as pressing “save and publish” on your Kindle. “It’s nice to get an editor, but you can hire an editor,” says Shatzkin. “It’s nice to get somebody who will pick a typeface for you—but there are lots of people who can pick a typeface for you.” You could in other words go around and simply hire all those people. Then again, you could let the publisher who has already hired those people do it for you.

Of course, the story I’ve been telling of The Art of Fielding is not typical. It’s not typical for an author to spend 10 years on a book, not typical for him to write such a good book even if he does, and, if he does produce a very good book, it’s not typical for publishers to respond the way they did. Little, Brown is not a typical publisher—while it has pretty much eliminated the “small” literary novel from its list and rarely publishes translations, it maintains the literary ethos of a much smaller house—and Michael Pietsch is not a typical editor. Even on the little things, Chad’s experience has been atypical. “I never had a meeting like that,” one well-regarded young novelist told me when I described Chad’s marketing-and-publicity meeting. “They talked to me on the phone once before scheduling my first tour,” he said, “but I think it was more to determine whether I was too fucking crazy to put in front of people.” Parris-Lamb agreed. “This is the royal treatment,” he told me. “They’re even paying for his author photo!” Believe it or not, publishers will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a book, and then tell the author to hire his own photographer.

Most writers, me among them, are by nature pretty cynical about publishing. It’s hard not to be, considering all the crap they put out and call books. And there’s no question that a lot of companies and people have lost their way: one editor who used to work at a Big Six publisher complained to me about its blind devotion to new releases at the expense of past releases. “I’d have books that sold 30,000 in hardcover and 15,000 in paperback that, the next year, the company simply dropped,” he said. “They didn’t care. They’d sell the rights to someone else for $300. This is a place with a very strong backlist, but they’re not trying to create that for the future.”

And yet every single person I met while writing this article—the publishers, the editors, the marketing and sales people—genuinely loved books. That’s why they were working in a business that, in the end, wasn’t particularly lucrative. They liked reading books and cared enough about them to devote their lives to making them. For every company or editor or agent who no longer cared, there were a number of younger people who did.

A young agent told me of a literary agency he used to work for that was so prestigious, and had so many excellent clients, that the top agents could no longer read their clients’ work—if they started reading, the whole exquisite machine they’d constructed would fall apart. The agent told me how, when he was just starting at this agency, a venerable old novelist delivered his final novel on a Friday afternoon. It was standard practice for the assistants to read everything that came in and write a report; in this case, my friend assumed that the head agent would read the manuscript as well. My friend spent his weekend curled up with the typescript; it wasn’t the novelist’s best work, but to be one of its first readers, and asked to comment—it was an honor! My friend wrote his report and sent it to the older agent, then sat outside his office as he called the venerable old novelist and read it to him, verbatim, over the phone. “He hadn’t read the book!” said my friend. “And, of course, no one was harmed. It didn’t matter. But I made a decision then that no matter how far I get or how high I rise up in this field, I will always read the work. Because, you know, that’s why I leave the house in the morning.”

Entourage

A week before BEA, I had joined Chad on a visit home to his parents in Racine. His sister, Heidi, who lives in Seattle, was also home, and the family was going up to the lakes in northern Wisconsin for the weekend to celebrate the Harbachs’ 40th wedding anniversary.

Racine, the Belle City of the Lakes, is separated from Milwaukee by half an hour of farmland; the city spreads back from Lake Michigan, with a thin layer of wealth on the waterfront, then the old manufacturing part of the city, still in a state of reasonable repair because of the SC Johnson company, makers of Pledge, Windex, and Off! Beyond that are a few miles of suburban sprawl, and then the farms start up again. Chad’s family lives in the suburban part, in a clean, comfortable ranch house on quiet Independence Road. On the basement level there is a Ping-Pong table; on the first floor, a large and sunny kitchen that Chad’s mother, Tammy, fills with stories of the neighbors, relatives, former teachers, and other friends of the Harbachs.

Chad and I spent the afternoon driving around. We swung by St. Catherine’s High School and ate four burgers at Kewpee, in downtown Racine. Then we checked our e-mail at bohemian Wilson’s Coffee & Tea. In the evening we had dinner back at the house; it was followed by an epic beer tasting. Chad’s father, Russ, is a dedicated home brewer. Though quieter even than Chad, he became expansive once his best friend, Tony Braun, came over for the beer tasting. We tasted an imperial stout, Russ’s imitation Thomas Hardy, Tony Braun’s pale ale, and a honey bragget from northern Wisconsin. As Chad later explained, Russ and Tony had taken a months-long, intensive beer course (“Beer College”) and were now in some demand across the Midwest to judge home-brew tastings. “Guys from Indiana will call them up and say, ‘We’ll give you $200 if you judge our beer contest,’ ” Chad said. “And my dad and Tony Braun will say, ‘Two hundred dollars? That doesn’t even cover our travel costs. And we’re busy. But—all right!’ ” On this evening Tony Braun was a little hot under the collar about some political pressure that had recently been brought to bear on the Belle City Home Brewers, of which he and Russ are active members. City officials were trying to ban them from offering their home brews at Racine’s annual beer-tasting fair. Tony Braun was ready to take the club and the festival over to Kenosha, if that’s how things were.

Eventually talk turned to Chad’s book, a beautiful blue galley of which was lying on the kitchen counter. “You should tell them to make a movie,” Tony Braun said, “but it needs to say in the contract that the movie stars Tony Braun and Scarlett Johanna.”

Chad’s father had a more humble proposal. “You’re going to go to Germany and Belgium on your book tour, right?” he said of the great beer-brewing countries. Chad admitted that he may in fact end up going there. “You’re going to need people to do things for you,” said Russ. “I can be your entourage.” Everyone laughed. We drank more beer. Early the next morning—they like to catch you unawares—Chad received a phone call from the student-loan collection agency that had been hounding him for years. He took the call and told them he’d pay down the principal—$30,000—that week.

When I got back to New York, I found a galley of The Art of Fielding and started reading. It had gotten better again since I’d last seen it: more compact, less sentimental, funnier. Once the hard work of plotting was done, Chad had filled it with many unexpected pleasures: the surreal on-field banter and off-field arguments; the invented over-literate college sportswriter Sarah X. Pessel; and the quotes from the novel’s book within a book, also called The Art of Fielding, a Wittgensteinian tractate about playing shortstop by the fictional Hall of Famer Aparicio Rodriguez (“99. To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step further: this is the shortstop’s dream”). Reading the galley, I saw that Henry’s anguish about perfection, and his sudden inability to make the throw to first, mirrored Chad’s difficulties completing the book, especially with so many people around him demanding that he just do it. I saw other things, too. But mostly I was just delighted. It was as if time itself had written this book, had worn the grooves of plot and character into it, had allowed its small angles and subtle insights to emerge eventually into the light. “To field a groundball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension,” Aparicio Rodriguez teaches us in Proposition 59.

One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.

Time had written the book, but Chad had had to become its conduit. How had he done this? I don’t know. I’d seen him: I’d sat in the next room or at the next table, I’d been there the whole time, and I still don’t know.

An extended version of this story, How a Book Is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding, is available on your favorite device through your Nook and Kindle reading apps. Go to vf.com/go/ebooks.